My experience predates any of the super-toxic elements like loot boxes, but I would guess that people mostly just shrug and do it if the client / boss says to do it. I mean, somewhere are engineers who are implementing all these features; you don’t really hear of a company that wanted to make them but was having any level of trouble getting their people to make it happen. There might be a certain level of back-and-forth at the design level about what we want to do and what type of game we want to make, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that the toxic features make a ton of money, which is usually the goal. I think it probably forms just one more nugget of the bullshit that periodically comes down the conveyor belt.

We only had one intense ethical argument that I remember; we were contracted for work by an organization that’s widely known for doing bad real-world things and had a big debate in the office over whether it was worth taking the contract. Ultimately I and the other lefties who were against it were overruled, and we took the contract. We did stick to a firm policy of no porn, even in the early hungry days, but I think that was more for reputational reasons than any kind of ethical standard.